On RedNote, Chinese Cooks Cheer On Americans Experimenting With New Cuisine
‘Bury me with steamed eggs’: homestyle dish goes viral among Tiktokers flocking to Chinese app
The Wall Street Journal
By Liyan Qi
Jan. 28, 2025 | 1218 words | ★★
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For Zaire Perry, a 24-year-old mother of three in Texas, making a legendary Chinese egg dish she had never heard of a few weeks ago was the beginning of an unexpected friendship.
Like a flood of Tiktokers in recent weeks, she had landed on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, because of the threat that TikTok would go offline in the U.S. And as it has for many others, it opened for her a new world of cooking.
Even after President Trump signed an executive order to keep TikTok open, many Americans who came to RedNote for the ban are staying for the food, inspired to take a crack at Chinese recipes. There has been a particular frenzy around one humble, homestyle dish rarely served at Chinese restaurants in the U.S.: steamed egg custard, or jidan geng, which looks like flan but isn’t sweet.
Perry was itching to start steaming eggs but was overwhelmed with the many recipes floating around on RedNote.
Then she connected with Hu Xiaoman, an administrator at a machinery maker in central China. Hu shared her family recipe and then applauded Perry’s first attempt as a huge success: silky but firm custard covered with a thin layer of sauce, topped off with scallions. Hu called her “a cooking genius.”
Hordes of Chinese users also clicked their approval on Perry’s post and on the steamed-egg experiments of other Americans. By Sunday, there were more than 41,000 posts with the hashtag #steamed_egg on RedNote, notching over 3.2 million views.
“Steamed eggs are really blowing up,” said Eshita Starr, a social influencer based in New York City, whose steamed-egg-custard tutorial on RedNote gained more than 46,000 likes.
It is a deceivingly simple recipe, involving just eggs and water and a pinch of salt, but even Chinese cooks who try it for the first time often fail to get the water-egg ratio right and either overcook or undercook the eggs, resulting in either an unattractive beehive or a watery blob.
Despite a slightly droopy egg texture on her first attempt, Leah Saifi, of Brooklyn, N.Y., still got thousands of positive comments on RedNote, with many users offering tips for improvement, such as covering the container with a plastic wrap, or mixing the egg batter with hot rather than cold water. Now she sees it as an easy and new way to cook an egg.
“Bury me with steamed eggs,” wrote Saifi in the caption accompanying the footage of her attempting the dish, which got nearly 130,000 likes.
“Honestly, I’ve been eating them every single day. I can’t stop,” said Saifi, who describes herself as an internet personality.
Social influencer Eshita Starr’s steamed-egg-custard tutorial on RedNote received more than 46,000 likes.
One top comment on her post said, “With this speed, all Chinese restaurants would go out of business!” “Who is the spy? Investigate immediately!” another RedNote user joked in English.
For Hu and Perry, steamed eggs were just the start. Separated by a 14-hour time difference and a language barrier, the two started sharing cooking tips.
Hu, 35, said she was surprised to learn from Perry’s recipes that a lot of American dishes are served warm. “My impression of American foods was that they are mostly cold, such as bread slices or salads. Her food made me feel warm, the warmth of family,” Hu said.
Hu said she is now watching American shows recommended by Perry. Her favorite is “2 Broke Girls,” a show about two young women from completely different backgrounds bonding over financial struggles and building their cupcake business.
From Texas, Perry said, “Food is something that can transcend language, cultural barriers. I don’t even speak Chinese and she speaks very little English, and yet we’re bonding over recipes.”
RedNote recently added a translation feature, and Hu and Perry have gone on to share child-rearing experiences and exchange photos of manicures and other aspects of their daily lives. Hu sent photos of a tree-lined street she walks down every day to her job. Perry shared how she ventured into a local Asian grocery store and bought baozi, or steamed buns.
The strained relationship between Beijing and Washington has cut into friendly interactions between Americans and Chinese people, despite both governments’ pledges to expand people-to-people exchanges. For one thing, even after China reopened after the pandemic, the number of Americans studying in China is much lower than before Covid-19.
RedNote, focused on cultural content, such as lifestyle and traveling, fills some of that void, said Manya Koetse, founder and editor in chief of What’s on Weibo, a website focusing on Chinese social media. “The hunger was there for cultural exchange,” Koetse said.
More than a dozen Tiktokers say they have found Chinese users on RedNote to be overwhelmingly welcoming and helpful. Partly contributing to the friendly vibe on the platform is that users of RedNote, like those on all Chinese social-media platforms, face censorship. Anything the government considers confrontational, politically sensitive or derogatory could be removed from the platform for violating community rules. Some Tiktokers got a taste of censorship within hours of opening their RedNote accounts.
In the U.S., Chinese grocery stores have also had new kinds of visitors. Over the past two weekends, a tiny Asian shop outside Poughkeepsie, N.Y., frequented by members of the local Chinese community, was suddenly overrun by teenagers clutching their phones and hunting for scallions and sesame oil, essential to steamed egg custard.
RedNote headquarters in Shanghai.
Jana Weiland, a product manager in Portland, Ore., said she thought she knew all the ways to cook eggs so when she saw the steamed eggs on RedNote, she had to give it a try. It took her 20 minutes of steaming rather than the 10 outlined in the recipe. “When I was cutting into the custard, I was definitely overthinking, afraid of it being liquidy, but it was not,” Weiland said. “It was such a fun cultural moment.”
When she posted about it, Chinese users offered feedback, with some asking why she used a knife to cut into the steamed egg rather than just using a spoon.
Alysa Hu, a project manager for an e-commerce company in California, said the Chinese she learned in college came in handy when she needed advice on making steamed egg custard. Hu said she has been helping her co-workers navigate RedNote, teaching them a little bit of Chinese every day, such as guanzhu wo, or follow me.
“It’s just been a really cool way to connect, not only with people on the other side of the world but to inspire those around me to break down the barrier,” she said.
Ahead of the Lunar New Year, on Wednesday, many Chinese RedNoters are posting new cooking challenges for the Tiktokers, dishes deemed auspicious for the most important celebration of the year, when many Chinese travel thousands of miles for family reunions. One such dish is steamed whole fish, with a name that sounds like the word abundance in Chinese.
Starr, the social influencer based in New York, said she is going to try something simpler: Coca-Cola wings, chicken wings braised in Coke. “It’s so interesting how Coca-Cola, such an iconic American product, is used in a uniquely creative way,” she said.
She has been sharing recipes to make Western foods, such as mushroom soup and mozzarella sticks, and hopes an American recipe might be trending in China soon.
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——新英文外刊，每日精选优质外刊文章，文章高质、话题丰富、时效新鲜，始于2016年3月。
